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By The concluding chapter from the Hooded Hood Thu Jun 30, 2005 at 10:20:56 am EDT |
Subject #218: Untold Ghost Stories of the Parodyverse: The Lighthouse –
Part Four: 24th May, 2005
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#218: Untold Ghost Stories of the Parodyverse: The Lighthouse –
Part Four: 24th May, 2005 24th May, 2005 Asil checked the possible places where the people running the FounderFest might be hiding something. The shingle strand under the boardwalk was already covered by the rising tide, the spring tide that would soon bring the waters high up the harbour wall. The colourful marquee that doubled as changing rooms and waiting area for the festival performers seemed completely innocent. “I didn’t like the look of those unkempt boys who were guarding the tent flap though,” Asil confided in George. “I met some like that last night. They weren’t nice people.” “I thought they might be on something,” the curator admitted. “Did you see the way they stared? I still don’t understand why we didn’t call the police about those people who attacked you in the Crown and Anchor.” “Listen George, I know this must seem very odd to you, but I absolutely have to find Sir Mumphrey. It’s very important that I give him his watch back. Will you trust me? Will you help me?” George Gedney shrugged. “I guess,” he replied. “This is turning into a very unusual evening.” Asil glanced out at the turbulent stormclouds shifting out to sea. The first flicker of distant lightning arced into the waters. “Lets hope it doesn’t get any more unusual,” she breathed. “George, do you see that pavilion thing the Mayor’s sitting in to watch the festival? That’s the only place we haven’t looked.” “We don’t know if your employer is around here at all.” “He’ll be here. I think he’s been specially invited.” Asil swallowed. “I think we underestimated how smart our… we were expected, that’s all. Listen, here’s what I want you to do…” The giant speakers crackled to life again, but this time their song was very different. A low ululating wail came over the PA, echoing round the rocky bay and reflecting back on itself with ever-increasing intensity. Somewhere between a lamenting song and a feral cry, the siren song seared through the minds of the crowded audience at the FounderFest, holding them enraptured; holding the whole town in thrall. “Now it begins in earnest,” Mayor Crane told Sir Mumphrey Wilton. “Watch carefully. It’s not every day you get to see a deity manifest. The eccentric Englishman felt the weed squirm within him. One savage twitch of the slimy black tendrils could end his life. He struggled to keep breathing through his clogged throat. The noise reached a crescendo then suddenly stopped. The audience stood like puppets awaiting a tug on their strings. From higher up the shore those few residents who had not been at the festival came jerkily out of their houses to shamble to the throng. Even ancient Molly Tillinghast pulled herself forward on wobbling crutches to die with the rest. The first heavy spots of thunder rain pounded down on the pier, harbingers of the coming storm. The wind rose, bringing an ozone tang to the impossibly hot air. The waves became higher, their spray washing over the end of the boardwalk, soaking the nearest onlookers. Her ears plugged with beeswax Asil Ashling slid through the stupefied crowd and saw Mumphrey Wilton beside Harker Crane. She waited until the Mayor and the gang of youths around him were looking out to sea to welcome the swelling tempest then rushed forward to rescue her mentor. The tendrils of seaweed burst up from the cracks in the boardwalk, wrapping round her ankles and calves and stopping her short. “Ah, you’ve arrived,” the Mayor noted, turning round to look at the captive. “I was starting to worry that Sir Mumphrey’s virgin sacrifice wouldn’t get here on time.” The weed made Mumphrey jerk round to face his amanuensis. Asil screamed as she saw the tangles of twitching seaweed hanging from the Englishman’s wide-open jaw. At a gesture from Harker Crane, ribbons of vegetable fibre snaked up and flicked the protective wax from the young woman’s ears. “You fools,” Crane scorned them. “You faced the sea god when he was wounded and broken, his mind gone, and you triumphed over his ignorant confused children; but you have never faced the full intellect and power of the reborn master.” “Mumphrey!” Asil called wildly, reaching out for him. The knots of rotting vegetable strands held her feet fast so her arms couldn’t quite reach the immobile prisoner. “This is his vengeance,” Crane went on. “The sea god accepts your sacrifice as his new bride, Sir Mumphrey Wilton. This girl will spawn forth his new form for the next sixty years until Cassiopeia’s chair again lofts above Polaris. The storm will claim this recusant village in vengeance for their apostasy. And I shall be rewarded above all men as the sea god moves his blessings to Paradopolis itself.” “Your sea god would get spanked by the Lair Legion in ten minutes flat!” Asil shouted at him. “And anyway, he’s just some fish-thing that slipped through dimensions and got washed up here because the walls between worlds happen to be soft. Whatever he does to me, whoever he murders here, it doesn’t change the truth.” Asil caught a fleeting look of pride on Mumphrey’s puce face. “You are wrong,” the Mayor said flatly. He pointed out to sea. “Behold.” As Asil followed his finger she saw the waters swell up as if in slow motion. The wind was much higher now, howling inshore to whip up the waves, and the heavy rain was drenching her to the skin. The wave grew higher and higher, impossibly gloatingly slowly, until a wall of water three hundred feet high towered over Willingham. And atop the crest, glistening in the beauty of his resurrection, the sea god stood looking at his bride. “He’s not my type,” Asil retorted, holding on to her courage by a thread. “When he sings to you, you will become his slave,” Harker Crane promised. He noticed that Asil was clutching some object wrapped in a drawer-string bag. She seemed to be trying to keep Crane’s attention from it. “Ah, but you still have Sir Mumphrey’s secret weapon!” her captor gloated as the kraken weed ripped it from her hand and dropped it in Crane’s own grasp. “This toy will not save you today.” Asil watched intently as the Mayor reached into the bag. He screamed in pain as the chip of unicorn horn seared him. “It reacts badly to impurity, so they tell me,” Asil declared. That was when George Gedney rushed forward and football-tackled the pain-wracked Mayor. “No!” the curator shouted. “Let her go!” His resistance lasted another ten seconds before the acolyte thugs overwhelmed him, dragged him from their leader, and hammered him to the ground. More weed from the sea wrapped round Gedney’s limbs, binding him on all fours before the angry Mayor. “Is that the best you can do, little hero?” Crane mocked. “At least Enoch Whitfield thought to bring a gun.” Sir Mumphrey Wilton’s weed-bound hands held the pocketwatch Gedney had pressed onto him before he began his diversionary assault. His fingers found familiar studs with practised ease and he set the mechanism to shift the foul matter that clogged within him into the future where it wouldn’t reappear within him. As the mayor turned to vent vengeance on the young curator Mumphrey thumbed the activator stud and stepped forward as a free man. “Nicely played, Asil m’dear,” he congratulated his amanuensis with a big, wicked smile. “Thank you,” the young woman grinned back. They were still on the brink of oblivion, against a deadly enemy of immense power ready to snuff them out. Asil had never felt more alive. “What?” the Mayor demanded as he saw the eccentric Englishman move of his own accord. There was a temporal flicker and suddenly Asil and George were no longer bound. “Time versus tide,” mused Sir Mumphrey Wilton. “Let’s see, shall we?” The Sea God surged forward on the crest of the wave that would destroy all of Willingham. “Now,” gloated Bogdan Vladivock in the spell-concealed caverns beneath his lighthouse. “As death presses wide the barrier, let the powers answer my plea!” Sir Mumphrey swung his pocketwatch at the end of it’s chain and hammered it hard into Mayor Crane’s face. As it hit it accelerated the processes of decay a thousandfold. Harker Crane screamed while he still had lungs that weren’t dust. It was a rotted corpse that toppled to the boardwalk. The weed boys lurched forward. Asil jumped in to keep them off Mumphrey’s back. “Er…” said George, watching in confusion as his date fended off half a dozen dangerous men. One of them brought forward the ornate box that contained the siren’s wail. George wasn’t sure what was in the casket but it looked important; so he grabbed it and tossed it over the pier. The merman wailed his siren call anyway. The speed of sound was just slightly slower at the moment, changing the pitch of his cry so it had no effect on humans. “Come on, you bounder!” Sir Mumphrey called to the sea god. “Time for some ecclesiastical reform, what?” The sea god’s massive intellect was overwhelmed then by his boundless hate for the eccentric Englishman. He abandoned the humanoid shell and burst forward, a titan of weed and tentacles sixty feet high. The tidal wave pounded down on the pier to wash away all the humans there. Mumphrey halted the wave with the last charge on his Chronometer of Infinity. The waters wouldn’t be held in stasis long. “Asil!” he called. “On it,” his amanuensis shouted back. “Come on George!” She ran towards the microphones and deliberately pointed them right at the giant speakers on the FounderFest platform. The feedback shriek was deafening before the amplifier blew out. That internship with NTU-150 had proved useful after all. The audience were woken from their siren spell and blinked back to consciousness. One by one they saw the impossibly slow tidal wave overwhelming the harbour, and one by one they fled. “No!” shrieked the merman. “They are mine! Vengeance is mine!” “Balderdash!” Sir Mumphrey told him. “Oh, and by the way, young Gedney might not have thought to bring along a revolver…” The sea god closed, a colossus of slime and sea detritus, towering over his enemy. “You think your mortal weapons can harm me in this form?” Mumphrey shrugged. “Depends on whether young Harper got those sums right that Xander set him. The ones that take into account the alignment of the stars and the weft of the dimensional tides and whatnot. Don’t pretend to understand myself. Get confused using a sextant and slide rule.” His forehead crumpled into a deep frown. “But what I do know is beasties that get their power from dimensional rifts and suchlike don’t much like bullets carved with specific counter-equations courtesy of a robotic flea, what?” And he unloaded six very special silver-teflon point .45 calibre bullets into the centre of the kraken weed. The backlash was enough to knock the Necromancer General clear across the cavern. It was ten minutes before he could control his central nervous system enough to stand up and find out what had gone wrong. “Where are my deaths?” he demanded, peering into the stygian deaths of his scrying crystal. “What happened?” The sea god was dead. His evil had been exorcised at last. His taint was gone from the village of Willingham. As his power had been broken the force had gone from the waters. The tidal wave had drenched the fleeing onlookers but without loss of life. “But my soul nets were set up to catch humans, not an extradimensional parasite entity,” Bogdan Vlastivock complained. He got up painfully and examined the shambles that was the remains of his necromantic lab. Then he swore. It really was back to the drawing board. Time for Plan B. “Come on,” he demanded, shaking the brazier of prophecy in his anger. “You got the necromantic energies unleashed by a sea god dying. That has to be worth some kind of result. Who is the Chosen One? Who?” Then chemicals in the brazier of prophecy ignited feebly and burned away most of the blood to leave four letters branded on the bottom of the copper. The Necromancer General glared at the random glyphs: N t i and s or z. He studied this for a moment, his thin pale lips moving as he calculated. Then he reached into one of the lightning-scorched cabinets and pulled out a small effigy of Nitz the Bloody. “I knew I was right not to sponsor this FounderFest,” Molly Tillinghast noted as she watched the harbour clean up. The medical services’ responmse to mass hysteria caused by ergot-infected seafood was well under way. “Absolutely,” Sir Mumphrey told her. “Good call.” She glanced at the eccentric Englishman with a puzzled reminiscent smile. “It’s nice to see old business so satisfactorily tied up at last,” she told him. “George Gedney helped too,” Asil gave credit where it was due. “Your curator. I knew they’d take the Chronom… I knew they’d search me for weapons, so I was the distraction while George gave Sir Mumphrey what he needed to solve the problem.” “Good show that chap!” Mumphrey congratulated the battered young man. “Thanks. But how am I going to document all of this in the Yarmouth House?” Mumphrey clapped his hands together. “Well, charmin’ place to visit, Willingham, but we must get back. Duty calls and all that. Evil to smite, paperwork to avoid, that sort of thing. Miss Tillinghast, Mr Gedney, good day to you both.” George Gedney swallowed hard. “Miss Ashling!” he blurted. Asil turned back to the curator. “Yes?” “I was wondering…” “Yes?” “Nothing. Have a nice journey home.” Molly Tillinghast shook her head. Youth was wasted on the young. She’d already given her number to Sir Mumphrey Wilton. The waters of the Atlantic lapped on the shingle shore around the Willingham harbour. The weathered old lighthouse stood starkly on its jagged peninsula where the worlds were closest together. The azure sky promised another fine day after the storm had released the pressures of the blistering weeks before. The village nestled in its sheltered bay. And waited. More on Willingham and the Necromancer General to come in Visionary and the Heart of Darkness Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2005 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2005 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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